


Ways Most Mysterious

by shadowolfhunter



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: F/M, Feelings, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-08 03:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8828635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowolfhunter/pseuds/shadowolfhunter
Summary: Lucifer was the devil. He was immortal, and therefore couldn't be seriously harmed. His detective fussed too much so Lucifer was going to show her that he would be fine.Chloe is going to kill him. Slowly. Because he's driving her out of her mind, he takes stupid risks, and yes maybe most of them have paid off just fine, except for that time he drove her to shoot him, and this.... She doesn't even know what this is/was... Except she's waiting for Lucifer to be all right... and keeping a lid on her burning temper is hard.





	1. Goddamit

**Author's Note:**

> AU. Set roughly in Season One and Lucifer tries for a second time to prove that he's completely impervious to damage to Chloe. It doesn't go according to plan, and Lucifer has a painful lesson to learn, and Chloe comes to a realisation too.

She literally couldn't believe what she was seeing, when he stepped out, her brain froze, words lost in the morass as her legs moved her forward and she was running. Too far away to do anything as the car clipped him hard, and the image of the shocked frozen look on his face as he was thrown to the ground was something that she would never forget.

 _Please let him be okay... Please... Please God... I don't pray... but this time... Please... Save him._ She fell to her knees beside him, gently placed a hand to his head, "Lucifer" she whispered, her fingers smoothing his hair, keeping her eyes on his face, eyes closed, the beginnings of a bruise already forming on his scraped cheekbone, watching him closely to keep her eyes from the horrible, twisted condition of his right leg.

All around her voices calling for a bus, running feet, organised chaos as her fellow officers worked to get help to her downed partner.

If he lived through this, she was going to kill him.

 

Chloe sat in the corner of the waiting area, cabinet to her left, large and uninteresting potted plant to her right. A little fence to keep the well-meaning noises of her colleagues out, she held on to her anger, nursed it to keep it warm, because this was not the first time he had done something foolhardy, but by golly it was going to be the last.

She had promised herself that. Promised God that if he would only survive this, she would be giving him a piece of her mind, put an end to this ridiculous nonsense. Heaven, hell... angels, demons, the devil..... _WINGS!!!_ He was never taking another foolish risk again. It hadn't even paid off, the perp had got away.

He was so beyond lucky, he'd been knocked cold by the fall, and the rest of the damage was minor. Except for his right knee. That was in a right mess. Cracked knee cap, torn anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments.

Lucifer was in surgery. He would be on crutches for weeks.

All she could feel now, along with the righteous anger, was the overwhelming sense of relief that her troublesome, adorable (oh she did not just think that...) was going to be alright. Sore and miserable for a while, but ultimately safe.

So Chloe sat and brooded as she waited for him.


	2. Wake Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gathering her brow like gathering storm  
> Nursing her wrath to keep it warm  
> "Tam O'Shanter" by Robert Burns
> 
> Lucifer wakes up, and no, this was not in the plan at all.
> 
> Luckily, Chloe is there to catch him.

He first becomes aware of the smell, chemical, sharp, nothing like his own bedroom, and the bed beneath him is nothing like the luxury of his own mattress. There's a curious sensation on his right side, his right leg to be exact. It feels detached. But not.

His head hurts, and his eyelids feel like they are weighed down somehow. And there's this really strange taste in his very dry mouth. He moves his lips, but no sound comes out.

He manages to force an eyelid up a little, and he's overwhelmed by white. It feels really strange, and the odd feeling of floating from his right leg resolves itself into an image. His leg is suspended in a frame of some kind, and wrapped from ankle to the top of his thigh in some kind of contraption, _no, no, no... this won't do at all_ he begins to panic at the sight in front of him and tries to roll over.

Which is when he registers the beeping, and there's this moment of vertigo and he feels like he's falling... and then there are a pair of arms around him, and he registers that it's Chloe, and he subsides in her arms with a whimper.

 

She's been waiting. Watching over him, planning very carefully what she is going to say, because while he can take stupid risks with his own life (though he isn't going to be allowed to do anything like this again, stupid deal with Chloe's boss or not), she has a daughter to think of, and she is so not going to be dragged down to his level of crazy, helpful or not.

But then he awakes and he's panicking and clearly not even seeing her, or hearing her, and he's falling.... and she's just there. He's in her arms, he finally registers that it's her, he collapses against her, burrows into her, like he needs her... and every single cross word in her head just flies away. There are nurses, and she should be handing him over to their care and getting out of the way, but when she tries to let go he shakes his head, and burrows even closer. The I/v in his arm is tangled round her, but he won't let go, so she eases up on to his bed, manages to get situated so that he can lean into her, then she's stroking her fingers through his thick black hair, every single angry word has gone.

 

Lucifer is hurting, and that is so many levels of wrong, it shouldn't be, but his detective is there. Holding him in her arms, and until this moment he hadn't realised how badly he needs this connection. She gives him something he barely recognises, and it's no longer fascinating, it is necessary to him. The immature quip on the tip of his tongue dies on his lips, and not just because of the terrible dryness of his very sore throat.

Apparently he's been gargling with hell's ash... or that's what it feels like.

 

She eases him into a position where she can hold the cup of water so that he can get a sip to ease the pain and dryness in his throat. She's been in hospital enough to recognise the signs. She supports his head with an arm, and when he's sipped some water she expects him to return to something like his normal, wildly inappropriate self, but the deep brown eyes give her an indecipherable look, then close, and he turns like a tired child, cheek resting against her skin to fall back into sleep again.

So Chloe sits, holding her partner in her arms, torn between her anger, and something that looks like it might be love...

Oh, she is so screwed.


	3. But I'm the Devil?!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucifer is out of his mind with boredom, and a little confusion. His knee isn't just healing up, so that's the Chloe effect, right? But Chloe hasn't been near him for the last two days and his knee still hurts. Then there are those strange stick things his doctor calls crutches. They are supposed to help him walk, only the first time the treacherous things dumped him on his ass. His mostly uncovered, unprotected ass.
> 
> Lucifer hates hospital...

Lucifer was bored. As his detective so cruelly once put it, in reference to his charms, he was bored on a chemical level.

He seemed to be broken. It wasn't so much his complete lack of interest in any of the number of very pretty nurses who were apparently there to wait on him hand and foot, there was this clenching feeling in his chest whenever he thought of his detective. A clenching that was not banished by the drugs they kept giving him. Those were supposed to take the edge off his pain. So they did. They kept his right leg mostly numb.

It was a pity that wasn't the pain that was bothering him. His detective hadn't been by for two days.

Then there was the gown he was wearing. It entirely lacked in style, and since it only displayed his spectacular assets from behind, and he was lying on those, he really couldn't see the point. Unfortunately, disrobing was a no-no... As Dr Linda pointed out, whilst it was okay to have few inhibitions, unwarranted public nudity was not a socially acceptable lack of inhibition.

So he concentrated on speaking to his therapist on the strange clenching feeling. And Dr Linda told him they had made another breakthrough.

Then thoroughly depressed him with the Love word.

Lucifer sighed, her gratuitous use of the love word aside, Dr Linda had a remarkable knack of putting her pretty little digit on the precise nature of the problem, and teasing it out. His detective hadn't been by to see him. For two days. That was practically unheard of. He was losing his touch. First the bleeding and the pain and the falling over, then there was the fat man sitting on his chest, now it was the clenching and the strangling... not forgetting that the detective effect was still going on without her being there. Lucifer couldn't stand up or walk about, and the detective was nowhere in sight.

He lay on his back, staring idly at his toes. He waggled them a little. That hurt.

Well now he definitely needed to go an find his detective, because this wasn't funny any more.

His wallet, phone, watch and lighter were in the drawer by this ludicrously uncomfortable bed. He had crutches, allegedly to help him walk, but Lucifer had his doubts about their level of trustworthiness, but so far, he had no clothes. His detective's admonitions about appearing naked in public were firmly fixed in his head, it was not as though he could take off the unbecoming blue and white gown, at least until he got to his detective's house. He smiled at the thought, but then the smile faded as he remembered that the spawn might be there, and the detective had been very clear about no nudity or other inappropriateness around her spawn. Lucifer needed to keep his Luciferness in check.

Not really understanding that whole "Luciferness" thing, because face it, being impulsive and occasionally short-sighted was definitely his jam, and surely that was part of what made him irresistible in the first place, Lucifer looked at his current situation, and his immediate needs and started to make a plan.

First he needed to escape from this hideous bed....

 

"What do you mean, Mr Morningstar is missing?" There was a sharpness to Chloe's tone that Dan had learned over the years meant nothing good. "Lucifer can't even walk unaided. He's on crutches, and medication... how can you not have noticed that he was missing." She listened for a few more moments, then ended the call abruptly and got to her feet.

"What about the case?" Dan cried.

"Something came up." And his straight-laced former wife turned on her heel.

Dan flinched at her tone, glad he was not on the receiving end of that. He also had good cause to know that she had a mean right hook.

 

He wasn't at Lux, he wasn't with Linda, or obviously the station house, she'd checked. There was one more place, and she was going to check, if she found him there was a fair chance she was actually going to kill him.

Chloe parked her car, and walked up to her front door. There was an unnatural quiet, and when she turned the key in the door, her babysitter was nowhere in sight. Lips pursed, she evaluated the situation and it was making her even more angry. Then she processed the sound coming from her bedroom. Trixie's voice, and it sounded like...

Chloe rounded the corner and pushed open the door. The scene that greated her eyes killed the angry words in her head.

Lucifer was sprawled across her bed, still in his hospital gown; half beneath her quilt, he seemed to be fast asleep, and Chloe drank in the sight, pale, exhausted looking, thinner than she remembered, his sleep more fitful than she imagined it would be.

And her daughter, cross-legged on the bed, right next to him. Trixie was fully clothed and reading from her favourite panda book.

"Mommy?" Trixie whispered, quietly closing the book and slipping off the bed with a cautious look behind her, making sure she didn't wake Lucifer. Chloe shook her head, suddenly so overcome with emotion that she felt she was going to bawl like a baby.

He was annoying and inappropriate, and sometimes he did things that were so wrong-headed she wanted to strangle him, but right then, exhausted, in pain and in her bed, he was safe, and there was a big part of her that could forgive him his craziness. As long as he was there beside her.

Chloe reached out to turn off the bedside light, and motioned Trixie before her. She would call him in as found, and leave him right there. Perhaps later they would get to the bottom of this foolhardy expedition..


	4. Emergency Situation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, Lucifer is in Chloe's bed, and it isn't in any way how either of them imagined it...
> 
> Then things take an alarming turn for the worse.

Chloe eased the covers up, and slid under them, next to Lucifer. He was on his side, facing her, injured leg supported by two spare pillows and a few small cushions.

Uncharacteristically subdued when he had woken up, she just couldn't find it in her heart to be cross with him. He had barely picked at the food she brought him, had swallowed the tablets she had acquired from the hospital pharmacy without complaint, without even his usual glib responses, then just quietly laid down and gone back to sleep when she helped him get comfortable.

No Luciferness, anywhere in sight.

It was disturbing.

Chloe studied him in the limited light, he was definitely paler, lines of tiredness on his face, his stubble heavier than normal and his hair natural. A couple of the soft, loose curls flopped down on his forehead. He looked vulnerable, and vulnerable Lucifer was a creature that Chloe found very difficult to deal with.

She eased closer, put out a hand to gently stroke his cheek, and her heart turned over when he made a soft noise that sounded very like contentment and nudged a little further into her palm. Despite his Devil schtick, and his very obvious social issues, he was a gentle guy, and she hated that this had happened to him, seeing him in pain and less than his usual Lucifer self was something horrible.

She'd even take his devilish smirk and outrageous innuendo if it would get him back on his feet quicker.

 

She awoke to the sound of coughing, surprisingly quiet, like he was trying to hold back, and she instinctively reached out, her fingers faltering as she felt the skin of his forehead. He was burning up, not the usual heat of his skin, Lucifer ran hot, but the heat of a fever. A bad one. "Lucifer" she whispered, and deep brown eyes peered at her through a narrow veil of long black lashes. The misery and pain she could read in his expression, and the desperation she could read in his eyes, broke her heart. He coughed again, and sat up hurriedly, his leg clearly giving a jolt of pain as the fit of coughing worsened.

Chloe sat up and grabbed for the bowl she had brought to bed with her. Got it under his head just in time, as he coughed and vomited. She was on her knees, arms wrapped around him, holding him close as he shivered and shook, vomiting into the bowl.

A brief lull in the horror of it, she managed to reach out and grab her phone, impatiently she dialled, held the phone to her ear, while trying to soothe Lucifer.

"Dan, I need you to get over here and look after Trixie." She waited for a response, "Lucifer's really sick, he needs to go back to hospital. Can you do this for me?" She rang off, and turned her attention back to her partner, gently rubbing his back she let him lean into her, "Hang on Lucifer, help is coming." And she dialled for an ambulance.

 

Under normal circumstances Dan would probably give her a hard time about Lucifer, but he visibly paled as the paramedics swept the injured man out of his wife's house into the waiting ambulance. "I'm going with him," Chloe barely glanced at her ex as she followed. All Dan could do was nod in agreement. Lucifer looked really bad.

 

Chloe put her dreadful hospital coffee down on the small side cabinet next to Lucifer's bed. He was asleep at last, hooked up to a number of machines, he had succumbed to an infection that had taken hold with a rapidity that startled the doctors, and she sensed that they were not telling her everything. There was something going on here, a cop's gut instinct was something that Chloe Decker lived by, and this was Palmetto all over again.


	5. Angel?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chloe thinks there is more wrong with Lucifer than a simple infection, and she starts to wonder how his surgery became infected so quickly.

"Dan, I really don't care what you think." Chloe gritted out between clenched teeth, "I need you to stay with Lucifer until I get back."

Dan rolled his eyes. Yeah, he felt a little sorry for the guy because the knee looked very painful, and Lucifer was still out of it, but come on, there was nothing going on here. He said as much.

Chloe's eyes narrowed. Her expression a level of anger that Dan had never seen before, and with a shudder, valiantly hoped that he would never see again. This was the mother tigress defending her cub. Dan wised up. A little.

She had a firm grasp of the front of his jacket. "Remember, no one comes in, if someone wants to change his dressings, they did that already half an hour ago, so check with his doctor. I will be back, just going to run this in to evidence."

"Evidence??" Dan's evil genius prompted his incredulous tone.

"Yeah, that little thing we need if we are going to catch this guy." Chloe waved the bags. A disgusting looking dressing in one, several other related items in the others.

Dan subsided. It wasn't that he didn't believe her, it was kinda he was fed up with the fuss she made over her weird nightclub owner sidekick. Sure the guy was a bit useful, and he'd protected Chloe in some dangerous situations, but Dan couldn't help but feeling most of those situations were created by Lucifer Morningstar himself. And Dan couldn't help it, the guy just rubbed him up the wrong way.

Lucifer was a dick, but a closer look at the bed's sleeping occupant, and there was Dan feeling sorry for the guy again.

Lucifer lay on his back, eyes closed, his injured leg raised in a frame. The knee was huge, grotesquely swollen, and even Dan could feel the heat radiating from it. Maybe his ex wife had something here. Dan sighed and sat in the chair by the bed, never seeing the sharp eyes that watched him through the door of Lucifer's private room.

 

Chloe pondered as she drove. There was something going on here, she had the same spidey sense feeling that she had had with Malcolm and Palmetto. Sometimes Dan's deliberate obtuseness drove her crazy, because just like Palmetto, she knew that there was something wrong, and Dan appeared to be more concerned with image in the department, and letting things slide.

She thought hard about the year she had spent having an annoying, inappropriate, occasionally arrogant nightclub owner follow her about like a huge overgrown puppy that was impossible to train. Lucifer was smart, irritatingly intuitive, a troublemaker, but he was also incredibly loyal and steadfast, protecting her. Even from some of the situations he sparked himself. This immortality schtick he insisted on beating himself with had really done a serious number with his leg this time. Now they were facing something that Chloe couldn't quantify, Lucifer was ill, and things were not looking good.

Maze had appeared, and it was all that Chloe could do to prevent her from going out and wreaking revenge, Maze called it punishment, on everyone within three floors and two hundred feet of where Lucifer was lying. Lucifer had just about roused himself enough to command Maze to stop, and his angry bartender had stomped out of the room thwarted in her mission of vengeance.

She had however, collected Trixie from school, and Chloe was grateful that Mazikeen's ferocious nature extended its super-protectiveness to her eight year old daughter. That Trixie loved the wild bartender, and her love for Lucifer just kept growing too, well Chloe just wondered how this highly idiosyncratic pair had become so deeply entrenched in her life.

 

"Ella," Chloe slunk in to the Lab Tech's workroom, "I need you to take a look at this."

Ella took the bags from Chloe's hand, "okay," she studied the dressing closely through the plastic, "this doesn't look normal." She made a face of distress, "this is from Lucifer's surgery wound?"

Chloe nodded.

Ella looked at the mess and shuddered. "You want everything I can get from this?"

"Yes. There's something going on, I know it." Chloe nibbled the end of her thumb nail. For the last three days she had kept close watch over Lucifer, alternating with Maze. They never left him alone for a moment. For the first two days his recovery had been rapid, more rapid than expected, then he'd crashed again and it was then Chloe knew she was right. This was not going to turn into Palmetto, she would protect her partner.

 

It was all quiet, Lucifer was asleep, so Dan figured he had time to get a cup of coffee. He wouldn't be gone more than a minute. He got to his feet, feeling ever so slightly sheepish he crept out the door. Great, just great, now Chloe had him going. This was a wild goose chase and Dan was really dumb to pander to her crazy theories. Again.

He pushed the coins into the machine, selected the button for the drink he wanted, watched the cup drop.

Alarms screamed through the air, and Dan spun round, heart racing, barely able to comprehend that nurses were rushing past him and there was a blue light flashing outside Lucifer's room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah I know... Lucifer's blood and bodily fluids are going to tell Ella and Chloe that Lucifer doesn't lie.
> 
> And yeah, Dan is a putz. (Sorry Dan, but I really don't buy your 'good guy' routine... not entirely.


	6. The Plot Thickens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Detective Chloe Decker is an angry woman. One little thing she asked her ex husband to do, and he can't even get that right. Ella has found signs of foul play, so now Chloe's tribe is running LuciferWatch. Designed to ensure that Lucifer is never left alone while Chloe searches for who might be doing this.
> 
> When another patient dies, just along the corridor, Chloe investigates, and Ella finds more evidence of foul play.
> 
> Who is playing God?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may have nicked a plot point or two from Agatha Christie's Murder Is Easy...

Chloe sits by Lucifer's bed and reviews what she's got from her notes. It isn't much, a soiled dressing that might have passed by if Ella hadn't noticed that there were two distinctly different types of DNA on it. Suggesting that the dressing was not fresh. Which made no sense.

Then there was the panic when Dan walked off to get a coffee and left Lucifer asleep and unguarded. Someone yanked one of Lucifer's monitors.

Three doors down on the left, quiet, unassuming, little Mr Martin Potter inexplicably died in his sleep.

That was enough to convince Chloe that these things were not accidents.

A part of her would have suspected Lucifer's brother, they certainly had a tumultuous relationship, and it wouldn't have been the first time Lucifer had presented with a black eye, or bruised ribs, and some strange excuse about it being his brother's fault. But even given their strained and uneasy feelings towards each other, Chloe knew it wasn't Amenadiel.

Besides, Maze would have wiped him from the face of the universe if it had been.

The death of Martin Potter said something very different. It seemed as though the hospital had an angel of death.

When Lucifer was sufficiently able to process what she was saying, Chloe broached the subject. Of course, Lucifer snorted and trotted out his usual routine about there being only one Angel of Death, his sister, and Chloe refrained from rolling her eyes (he was sick and therefore not entirely processing) and pointed out that this was humans' (indulging him, because easier to deal with) way of describing a health practitioner who liked to play god. (Small g, Lucifer... not Dad).

He told her once again that it didn't work like that, so she pressed his meds button, and he drifted back to sleep mid-argument. _Sorry._ She patted his hand gently, and pulled the covers up a little, he sighed in his sleep and turned towards her as far as his leg would allow; so she sat back in her comfy chair (annexed from the waiting area on the floor below) and studied her notes again.

Lucifer had gotten sick with remarkable rapidity. The infection was back under control, then flared up again with no warning. By lurking around the coffee machine and the nurses' station, and anywhere the nurses would congregate, Chloe had picked up that Lucifer was not the only patient who had gotten suddenly worse. More than once.

He grunted in his sleep, and his hand reached out to wrap itself around her wrist. He always seemed to know when she was there. Awake or asleep. Sometimes she wondered just what it was that had put her so securely on his radar.

In amongst the various patients who had become worse despite apparent routine operations, there was only one outlier. What was special about Martin Potter? Chloe turned to the background check she had run on the man, and settled down to read.

She had all night. Trixie was with Dan, Ella had a day off, so would be by to relieve her Lucifer sitting duties in the morning. She smiled to herself, he looked so peaceful in sleep, she reached out to smooth back the loose curls that had flopped over his forehead, he made a thoroughly contented sound and moved a little closer. Chloe put the folder aside and turned toward her Lucifer. He was getting better, but still in pain, and the doctors had kept him off his feet since his relapse. She wanted her partner back.


End file.
